Book Details

ISBN 139781847199645

Paperback356 pages

Book Description

The popularity of online shopping has increased dramatically over the past few years. There are plenty of options available if you not are planning to build your own e-commerce solution but sometimes it's better to use your own solutions. It may be easy to find an e-commerce system but when it comes to extending it or using it you might come across a lot of difficulties.

This book will show you how to create your own PHP framework that can be extended and used with ease, particularly for e-commerce sites. Using this framework you will be able to display and manage products, customize products, create wish-lists, make recommendations to customers based on previous purchases, send email notifications when certain products are in stock, rate the products online, and much more.

This book helps you build a Model-View-Controller style framework, which is then used to put together an e-commerce application. The framework contains template management, database management, and user authentication management. With core functionality in place, e-commerce-focused features are gradually added to the framework including products, categories, customizable products with different variations and customer input, wish-lists, recommendations, the shopping basket, and a complete order process.

At the end of the book, you will have an e-commerce architecture that will take you from viewing or searching for products, and adding them to your basket, through the checkout process and making payment for your order, to your order being dispatched. Focus is placed on flexibility, so that the framework can be extended as the needs of a particular store change, as illustrated by one of the appendices, which goes through the process of modifying the store to sell downloadable products, as well as physical ones.

Supplementary information, such as how to market and promote an online store, as well as take regular backups and perform maintenance is also covered, ensuring you have every chance of success with you own e-commerce framework backed store.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: PHP e-commerce

e-commerce: Who, what, where, why?

Rolling out your own framework

e-commerce: What does it need to do/have?

Our framework: What is it going to do?

Our framework: Why is it going to do it?

Summary

Chapter 2: Planning our Framework

Designing a killer framework

Building a killer framework

What about e-commerce?

Summary

Chapter 3: Products and Categories

What we need

Building products, categories, and content functionality into our framework

Routing products and categories

Embedding products

Summary

Chapter 4: Product Variations and User Uploads

Giving users choice

Giving users control

Shopping basket preparation

Summary

Chapter 5: Enhancing the User Experience

Juniper Theatricals

The importance of user experience

Search

Providing wish lists

Recommendations

Help! It's out of stock!

Giving power to customers

Any other experience improvements to consider?

Summary

Chapter 6: The Shopping Basket

Shopping baskets

Our basket

Considerations for our shopping basket

Creating a basket

Basket contents

From visitor to a user

Cleaning the basket

Displaying the basket on every page

Summary

Chapter 7: The Checkout and Order Process

Some examples

The process

Summary

Chapter 8: Shipping and Tax

Shipping

Tax

A look at our basket now

Summary

Chapter 9: Discounts, Vouchers, and Referrals

Discount codes

Purchasable voucher codes

Referrals

Summary

Chapter 10: Checkout

Order process review

Authentication

Delivery address

Payment method

Confirmation

Summary

Chapter 11: Taking Payment for Orders

Taking payment

Taking payment online

Taking payment offline

Summary

Chapter 12: User Account Features

User account area

Changing details

Viewing orders

Expansion

Summary

Chapter 13: Administration

Dashboard

Products and categories

Orders and customers

Miscellaneous

Summary

Chapter 14: Deploying, Security, and Maintenance

Deploying

Security

Maintenance

Summary

Chapter 15: Marketing, SEO, and Customer Retention

Marketing sites and stores powered by our framework (and other sites for that matter)

Search engine optimization

Customer retention

Summary

What You Will Learn

Plan and develop a flexible, scalable PHP framework with emphasis on e-commerce

Implement the Model-View-Controller architecture within the framework and learn how to use the registry design pattern to centralize core features

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